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Several international curators and museum directors, including Connie Butler of MoMA PS1, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Julieta Gonzalez of the Wexner Center for the Arts, and Madeleine Grynsztejn of MCA Chicago, selected artworks that they believe define 2025. Highlights include Ayoung Kim's video installation 'Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0º Receiver' (2024), Beeple's 'Regular Animals' premiered at Art Basel Miami Beach, and Kerry James Marshall's painting 'Haul' (2025) from his retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts. Julieta Gonzalez also pointed to a broader constellation of practices emphasizing collectivity, ecological thinking, and Indigenous cosmologies rather than a single emblematic work.

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The sixth edition of Upstate Art Weekend (UAW) launched with a party at Assembly in Kingston, New York, founded by Helen Toomer in 2020. The festival has grown from 23 participants to 158 across 6,000 square miles, reflecting the pandemic-era exodus of artists and collectors from New York City to the Hudson Valley region. The event featured a fundraiser for abortion-rights nonprofit Noise for Now and drew a diverse crowd of attendees.

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Art Basel dealers recall the fair's early days, from its founding in 1970 by Swiss dealers Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner, and Balz Hilt to its evolution into a global powerhouse with editions in Hong Kong, Miami Beach, Paris, and soon Qatar. Veterans like David Fleiss of Galerie 1900-2000, Thaddaeus Ropac, Iwan Wirth of Hauser & Wirth, and Dominique Lévy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan share personal anecdotes, including chaotic customs incidents, childhood memories, and the fair's shift from a Eurocentric gathering to the world's premier art fair.

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Art Basel Paris is undergoing a major transformation for its third edition, officially rebranding from 'Paris+ par Art Basel' and moving into the newly renovated Grand Palais. The historic venue, fresh from a $500 million restoration, allows the fair to expand its footprint by 26 percent, hosting 194 galleries compared to last year's 154. The move includes the opening of the ornate balconies for emerging galleries and a new sector called Premise, signaling the fair's transition from a successful 'preamble' to a permanent fixture in the French capital.

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Miami Art Week 2025 is set to be a major destination for collectors and art enthusiasts, featuring a packed schedule of fairs, gallery shows, museum exhibitions, and public art installations across Miami Beach. Key highlights include the Pop Art survey at the Margulies Warehouse showcasing works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Johns; the Rubell Museum's first solo survey of Thomas Houseago; a site-specific installation by Igshaan Adams at the ICA Miami; and Jack Pierson's exploration of Miami's influence on his work at the Bass.

Artist Trevor Paglen Will Curate the Swiss Edition of Art Basel’s Digital Art Sector

Artist Trevor Paglen will curate the third edition of "Zero 10," Art Basel's digital art sector, at the fair's Swiss edition from June 17–21. Major galleries including Marian Goodman, Hauser and Wirth, and Almine Rech will present works by artists such as John Gerrard, Agnieszka Kurant, Avery Singer, and Hito Steyerl. Paglen co-curates with digital art strategist Eli Scheinman, and the presentation, titled "The Condition," surveys seven decades of instruction-based and computational art, featuring pioneers like Vera Molnár, Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth, and Ben F. Laposky alongside contemporary stars.

Hiba Schahbaz: The Garden

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Hiba Schahbaz is the subject of her first major museum retrospective, "The Garden," at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Curated by Jasmine Wahi, the exhibition features 80 works spanning 15 years, tracing the artist's evolution from traditional Indo-Persian miniature painting in Lahore to her current large-scale practice in Brooklyn. The show highlights her recurring use of the female nude—often a stylized self-portrait—navigating mystical landscapes filled with Sufi poetry, mythical creatures, and art historical references.

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Artist Joe Coleman is the subject of a new documentary film, "How Dark My Love," directed by Scott Gracheff, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Concurrently, Coleman has curated a group exhibition titled "Carnival" at Jeffrey Deitch gallery, featuring his own hyperrealistic paintings alongside works by artists such as Derrick Adams, George Condo, and Anne Imhof, as well as his personal collection of oddities and ephemera. The film centers on the creation of Coleman's magnum opus, a life-size portrait of his wife, Whitney Ward, titled "Doorway to Whitney," which took nearly four years to complete.

'It’s like the natural world. Nothing lasts forever': Tadashi Kawamata on creating his temporary sculptures

Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata created a temporary wooden vortex sculpture titled "Tornado" inside the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, made from 5,000 individual pieces of wood and installed on the grand staircase for just two weeks in February. The work was commissioned by Ruinart as part of its "Conversations with Nature" series, which presents a piece in Paris before permanently installing it at the champagne house's headquarters in Reims. Kawamata, who has lived in Paris for 18 years, is known for using found materials and creating site-specific, temporary interventions on or inside architecture, emphasizing spontaneity and impermanence.

As Cuban crisis deepens, diaspora artists have a message of compassion

Artists Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares are showcasing a salvaged, bullet-ridden Cuban migrant vessel at Miami’s Piero Atchugarry Gallery. The exhibition, titled 'Exile', serves as a visceral focal point for the escalating humanitarian crisis in Cuba, where citizens face systemic collapse, starvation, and political imprisonment. Through the concept of 'embodiment' rather than mere empathy, the artists confront the harrowing 93-mile journey across the Straits of Florida undertaken by those desperate to escape the island's dictatorship.

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Volume Gallery, a Chicago gallery specializing in art and design, is tripling its size and moving to a new location in the West Town neighborhood. The gallery, founded by Claire Warner and Sam Vinz, will open a 3,500-square-foot space on February 13, marking its third location since its 2010 launch. The inaugural exhibition, "The Heresy of Legacy," will feature works by artists and designers including Selva Aparicio, Richard Artschwager, and Joyce Scott.

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Gloria Klein, a late New York-based painter known for anxious acrylic arrangements and methodical mathematical systems, is the subject of a new solo exhibition titled "Crisis Management" opening January 9, 2026, at Anat Ebgi New York. The show presents many of her later paintings for the first time, and coincides with the announcement that Anat Ebgi now represents her estate. Klein, born in Brooklyn in 1936, was a queer artist who participated in the feminist publication HERESIES, created portraits of critics Arlene Raven and Lucy Lippard, curated the 1977 exhibition "10 Downtown: 10 Years" at PS1, and was a member of the Criss Cross art cooperative. Despite a recent sale of her work for $30,000 at Frieze Los Angeles in 2023, she remains relatively unknown.

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Artnet News highlights the top photography moments of 2025, including Sara Cwynar's exhibition of search-engine images at ICA Boston, Inuuteq Storch's debut at MoMA PS1 showcasing his Greenlandic hometown, and Dietemar Busse's Polaroid portraits celebrated at Amant, New York. The year also saw Wolfgang Tillmans' blockbuster farewell exhibition at the Centre Pompidou before its five-year renovation, and Marian Goodman Gallery's inaugural show of Ana Mendieta's work, "Back to the Source," featuring her iconic photographs and performances. Mendieta's work was also spotlighted at Art Basel Miami Beach, with her piece "Sandwoman" (1983) drawing emotional responses from visitors.

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Art Basel Miami Beach is set to open this week, and Artnet News highlights four emerging artists to watch. Among them are Nour Malas, a Syrian painter whose four-panel work for Dubai's Carbon 12 gallery reflects on her childhood and the fall of the regime, blending abstraction with political memory. Zé Tepedino, a Brazilian artist from Rio de Janeiro, creates eco-minded sculptures from beach detritus like flip-flops and umbrellas, riffing on Brazil's social history and consumer culture. Other featured artists include those working with ethereal staged worlds, memory-soaked abstraction, and sculptural experiments in Lycra, offering a vivid snapshot of new voices at the fair.

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At Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Los Angeles–based gallery Commonwealth and Council is distributing a stack of posters featuring Andrea Fraser's latest project, *Lexicon* (2025). The work reproduces a list of approximately 200 words that have been banned or censored under the Trump administration, originally published in the *New York Times* in March 2025. The list includes terms related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), such as “racial diversity,” “activism,” “women,” and “they/them.” Fraser, known for her institutional critique works like *Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk* (1989), created *Lexicon* as a direct response to executive orders terminating DEI programs and the subsequent preemptive censorship by federal agencies. She describes the project as an affirmation of art's role in fighting censorship, and it is linked to her ongoing research on museum boards and political donations.

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The second edition of the Aspen Art Fair returns to the historic Hotel Jerome from July 29 to August 2, marking the launch of Aspen Art Week. The fair has more than doubled its exhibitor count from 21 to 44 galleries across 15 countries, including newcomers like Sean Kelly and Marianne Boesky, alongside international participants such as Praise Shadows, Anat Ebgi, the Sunday Painter, La Loma Projects, and 193 Gallery. Programming includes talks with artists Mickalene Thomas and Issy Wood, curated home tours, and a site-specific exhibition inspired by *A Room of One’s Own*. Cofounders Becca Hoffman and Bob Chase emphasize the fair's intimate, un-boothlike atmosphere, with in-room installations transforming guest suites into salon-style exhibitions.

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The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Miami has opened "Mildred Thompson: Frequencies," the first comprehensive retrospective of the late artist Mildred Thompson (1936–2003). Spanning five decades, the exhibition brings together 49 works—including wood assemblages, monochromatic prints, and oversized triptychs—sourced from the artist's estate and Galerie Lelong & Co. It traces Thompson's career as she moved between the United States and Germany, highlighting her stylistic evolution and her deep engagement with abstraction, science, and spirituality. The show follows earlier focused presentations like "Against the Grain" (2018) at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the 2017 "Magnetic Fields" exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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Gordon Robichaux, a gallery located on the ninth floor of a high-rise in New York's Union Square, has opened two exhibitions dedicated to the late artist and curator Jenni Crain, who died suddenly from Covid-19 in 2021 at age 30. The shows feature an unrealized floor sculpture by Crain, completed by her foundation and collaborators, and an untitled exhibition including works by artists who influenced her, such as Tee Corinne, March Avery, and Kate Millett. The gallery is also dedicating its booth at Frieze New York to Crain, highlighting her role as a friend, curator, and salesperson during the gallery's early years.

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The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will host "KAWS: Family," the first West Coast museum solo exhibition for the artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly). The traveling show, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, is currently on view at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and will bring KAWS's signature cartoon-like characters—including Companion, BFF, and Chum—to the Bay Area.

‘I paint the kind of people I’m attracted to’: Hernan Bas on hiding from the world in Venice

Cuban-American artist Hernan Bas has been living in Venice, painting tourists while reflecting on the ironies of mass tourism and his own status as a visitor. His new series, titled "The Visitors," comprises 30 paintings that will be exhibited at Ca' Pesaro, Venice's modern art museum, alongside the Venice Biennale. The works range from bleak to satirical, depicting young white men in tourist scenarios—such as a grinning youth at Holi in India or another cradling a koala—and explore themes of alienation, innocence, and the uncanny. Bas, who is gay, acknowledges that his subjects are often the kind of people he is attracted to, and he emphasizes narrative as central to his practice, aiming to be a conceptual artist who happens to paint.

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Artnet News's Wet Paint column announces Brian Belott's upcoming exhibition "Upside Down Zebra" at the Watermill Center in Water Mill, Hamptons, opening next week. The show features over 400 artworks made by children under age 6, including offspring of Willem de Kooning and Henry Miller, alongside 40 response pieces by contemporary artists like Robert Nava, Chris Martin, Darren Bader, Katherine Bernhardt, Carroll Dunham, and Christopher Wool. Belott draws from the archive of educator and psychologist Rhoda Kellogg, who collected over two million children's drawings, organizing works by her 20 types of scribbles.

New Ways of Seeing at the Outsider Art Fair

The 2025 Outsider Art Fair in New York City, featuring 68 exhibitors at the Metropolitan Pavilion, showcased a vibrant range of work by self-taught and autodidactic artists. The event was marked by strong sales and enthusiastic attendance, serving as an egalitarian counterpoint to more traditional blue-chip art fairs.

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Ching Ho Cheng (1946–89), a Chinese-American artist who described himself as working "with paper, instead of on it," is the subject of a revival of interest, including a current solo show at Bank gallery's New York outpost featuring his airbrushed gouache works from the mid-to-late 1970s. Cheng, who lived and worked in Suite 903 of New York's Chelsea Hotel, created spiritual, experimental works ranging from psychedelic paintings to torn-paper pieces and monumental oxidized sculptures, before his career was cut short by AIDS-related complications. His papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art were digitized in 2024, and his work will be included in a group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a major institutional retrospective at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 2027.

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A group of cultural leaders including Kristina Newman-Scott, Heather Hubbs, Franklin Sirmans, Maribel Pérez-Wadsworth, and Sarah Harrelson hosted a launch party at Tropezón Miami for ECOLOGIES, a four-day series of public programming presented by NADA, the Knight Foundation, Pérez Art Museum, and CULTURED. The event featured tapas and tequilas, with guests including philanthropists Jorge and Darlene Pérez, artist Anastasia Samoylova, and NADA Director Heather Hubbs, among many others. Attendees received a copy of 'The Deep State: Art, Culture & Florida' as a parting gift.

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MSCHF, the Brooklyn-based art collective known for viral stunts like the Big Red Boot and a Damien Hirst dot-selling ATM, has unveiled a new participatory sculpture titled *King Solomon's Baby* (2025). The work is a large-scale polystyrene foam and paint sculpture that will be progressively dismembered and sold in thin slices as more buyers join. Priced at $100,000 for a single buyer, the cost drops as more participants purchase shares, down to $100 each if 1,000 people buy in. Sales open July 10 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, with the fully deconstructed work on view July 13.

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Argentinian artist Pilar Zeta has unveiled 'The Observer Effect', a monumental public sculpture installed on Miami Beach during Art Basel Miami Beach. The work, presented by the Shelborne by Proper, features a colonnade of columns and arches with a matte automotive paint finish that shifts appearance with light and weather. Zeta activated the piece with sunrise and sunset performances by musician Laraaji. The self-taught artist, who moved to Miami at 19 and previously created album art for Coldplay, has also announced a follow-up installation opening next month at Place du Louvre in Paris.

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Artist and activist Michele Pred has opened a solo exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York, showcasing a body of work that addresses the erosion of civil and reproductive rights. The exhibition features her signature electroluminescent wire-stitched vintage handbags, sculptures made from found objects like wooden gavels and disarmed bullets, and large-scale inflatable abortion pill sculptures. Pred’s practice, rooted in her upbringing between California and Sweden, utilizes approachable domestic objects to deliver urgent political messages regarding bodily autonomy and social justice.

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The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has announced the prize winners for its 2025 Made in L.A. biennial. Ali Eyal received the $100,000 Mohn Award, Carl Cheng won the $25,000 Career Achievement Award, and Greg Breda was selected by public vote for the $25,000 Public Recognition Award. The winners were chosen by a jury of curators from prominent institutions.

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Earlier this spring, artist Julia Isídrez led a guided tour at São Paulo's Gomide & Co. gallery for a joint exhibition with Maria Lira. The show highlights two artists from different generations and mediums—Lira from Brazil (painting) and Isídrez from Paraguay (sculpture, featured in the 2024 Venice Biennale)—who both engage Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous traditions from a contemporary perspective. Gallerist Thiago Gomide rejects labels like 'folk' or 'popular,' insisting it is simply an art exhibition. The article profiles a network of Brazilian dealers, including Vilma Eid of Galeria Estação and Antonio Almeida of Almeida & Dale, who have worked to revive interest in arte popular, a category historically applied to self-taught, Indigenous, and Black artists.

7 Essential Museum Exhibitions to Visit in Paris

Paris is hosting a major art week with Art Basel Paris returning to the renovated Grand Palais, alongside numerous other fairs like Paris Internationale, Design Miami.Paris, and Asia NOW. To complement the fair circuit, Galerie has curated a list of seven essential museum exhibitions across the city, including shows on Pontus Hulten with Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely at the Grand Palais, a Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton featuring over 270 works, and a survey of Melvin Edwards at the Palais de Tokyo, among others.